Hanjian (Traitor)! Collaboration and Retribution in Wartime Shanghai

One of the most commonly used epithets in the Chinese popular press of the 1930s and early 1940s was the term hanjian, which meant “traitor” or “traitor to the Han.” According to the Hanyu da cidian, the term “originally indicated the scum of the Han people [Hanzu bailei]. Later it generally came to allude to someone who throws in his or her lot with a foreign people [waizu] or with foreign invaders, willingly serves at their beck and call, and sells out the interests of the ancestral land and the people [zuguo minzu].”¹ The key word, jian, exists in two